Does rest of the world need iPhone? Reasons why iPhone could flop world over
The latest issue of Business week has an interesting story “ Does Japan Need the iPhone ? The world’s most sophisticated users of wireless technology may be unimpressed by Apple’s high-tech gadget”© millionface.com
Kenji Hall has provided valuable insights into the Japanese cellular market giving valid arguments about how the Japanese fell for the iPod. So why should they not embrace the iPhone, too? After all, the iPod controls about 50% of the Japanese market for portable media players.© millionface.com
Dear Kenji, why talk about only the Japanese 98 million cell-phone users who will be hard bunch to please. I would like to go a step further here and say by the time Mr. Jobs makes the iphone available to the rest of the world cell phone carriers, it might be too late. I have always admired Mr. Jobs and his marketing genius, but legends go wrong too. Mr. Jobs you went wrong with your iphone price, your first P of Marketing mix went wrong and I for one fear in the near future the second P (Place) will go wrong too unless you move fast and make the iphone available globally. Mr. Jobs the initial hoopla and hullabaloo surrounding iphone is long gone.© millionface.com
In Japan, consumers won’t be as star struck by the iPhone’s high-tech gadgetry as users elsewhere. Already Japan’s 10 handset makers, which dominate the domestic market, already offer dozens of models typically costing several hundred dollars that send e-mail, browse the Internet, shoot photos and videos, and even pick up live TV broadcasts. Most come with a built-in global positioning system, and some even double as credit cards and commuter passes or safeguard personal data using fingerprint or face-recognition technology.© millionface.com
Mr. Jobs at times your strength can become your weakness, you locked the phones and people unlocked them and bought them off ebay to use in their markets. These unlocked iphones have killed the initial excitement and cannibalized the market. A well-connected person tells me iphone is a flop in India (even before launching), and his argument is pretty valid – “All these unlocked iphones can perform only task of receiving and making calls. Most of the advanced features like Visual Voicemail, web, maps, GPS, widgets, youtube, itunes, pop3, IMAP etc etc don’t work. People are much happy with advanced NOKIA phones, the iphone exctiment is waning with every passing day”. I am sure there must be many such stories from other parts of the world.© millionface.com
The reason why I am focusing on south Asia and Southeast Asia is because this is the world’s largest cellular market and nerve center of all cell phone technology. By the time we Americans moved from CDMA to GSM model, people down there had sent trillions of text messages and downloaded billions of gigabytes of stuff© millionface.com
As per the Businessweek’s story, the iPhone doesn’t work on Japan’s advanced third-generation, or 3G, network. Rumors are abound that Steve Jobs & Co. will release a new, faster 3G iPhone next year. But analysts are skeptical that will be enough to please consumers in Japan. In its current form, the iPhone’s 3.5-inch touchscreen and its access to online applications such as YouTube and Google (GOOG) Maps are about all that set it apart from other handsets in Japan.© millionface.com
© millionface.com
Reason why iphone could possibly flop or be unsuccessful world over© millionface.com
Fierce Competetion and Outdated design: Potential Turnoff for being a late entrant, completion has already much slicker and better-featured phones.© millionface.com
Limted Functionality: Some of its functions won’t be all that useful like in Japan, the iPhone’s Wi-Fi networking, for instance, won’t get much of a workout since few Japanese retailers are wired for such short-range broadband wireless Internet service© millionface.com
Technology incompatibility issues with cellular carriers, bandwidth issuesmillionface.com
Pricing already burnt fingers once that too on home ground, don’t know what to expect from rest of the world, there are no contracts unlike US© millionface.com
Sluggish go-to-market strategy, why this wait, what is stopping APPLE to get into other markets, it is a highly competitive market in today’s digital economy it takes a few days to become outdated in the market and Mr. Jobs has already lost over 6 months (in the US iphone was launched Friday, June 29 2007)© millionface.com
Tunnel visions/biased market some of the users have already used featureless unlocked phones creating strong negative bias© millionface.com
Negative word of mouth publicity already set in by above-mentioned users.© ionface.com
Brittle design can be bane in others parts of the concrete and not so concrete world, making iphone prone to breakage© millionface.com
Lack of CDMA compatibility, this is not all big a reason because expect US world relies on GSM networks but still many countries have an equal number of GSM vs CDMA subscribers© millionface.com
Cumbersome Activation for not so tech savvy: Mr. Jobs will have to remove the first step of activation via computer, trust me world over cell phone users don’t necessarily possess computers or vice versa.© millionface.com
© millionface.com
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